Mostly Sex

I’ve been reading your emails and comments with interest. Most are about sex, as can be expected. What else is there to think about at work? Of course, there’s the work itself, but, you know, come on. A few of your comments were about politics, and I’ll get to those, too. But first, thanks to everybody who wrote in.

By the way, I mentioned how seven years ago, when I asked for readers to tell me which movie people they’d choose for a “romantic interlude” I got almost all women writing to me. This time, asking for a “sexual interlude,” I got mostly men. Interesting. Though women did write, and some of them seem to like very bad guys — like the psycho Roman emperor in Gladiator or Michael York’s Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. See, it just doesn’t pay to be a nice guy — unless, perhaps, you’re as erotically adept (how’s that for a euphemism?) as Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy.

Movies are designed to seduce audiences. I started this job in my mid-twenties, a dangerous age for a film critic, in that it’s very difficult for any man to put together a coherent thought between the ages of 13 and 30. Looking back on my earliest reviews — which are fortunately not available on line — I see that I was falling in love at about a rate of three times a week. There are some advantages to getting older, like being able to think straight.

In no particular order, some comments on your comments:

1. Elisha Cuthbert in The Girl Next Door. She made quite an impression on several of you, and I won’t claim immunity. It’s also an extremely good movie, very smart, very funny. Not the usual teen sex comedy.

2. Emmanuelle Beart. My enthusiasm for this French actress in La Belle Noiseuse was seconded by a few of you. It’s a four hour movie in which Beart stands around, for most of it, naked while an artist guy paints her portrait. It’s a great film, and one of you commented that he thinks it’s funny that male critics bend over backwards praising the picture when they’re really just attracted to Beart. And that’s true to this extent: If she were homely, the movie would be a pretty rough slog. But the fact that she’s beautiful guarantees nothing. Marco Belloccio’s Devil in the Flesh featured Maruschka Detmers walking around naked for most of the movie, and after an hour of watching it just felt to me as though I’d been dating this woman for about two long years. That La Belle Noiseuse remains fascinating is a testament to the film’s overall greatness — and also to Beart’s beauty, which is a matter of spirit and character and not just appearance.

3. Neve Campbell in Wild Things. This one I found interesting, the differences in what attracts different people. Most of you who referenced this movie noticed Denise Richards, not Neve Campbell. But if you like Neve, see James Toback’s latest movie, When Will I Be Loved.

12. Isabelle Huppert in I (Heart) Huckabees. This one surprised me, not the presence of Isabelle on the list, but the choice of movie. Not the young Isabelle of, say, Loulou, but the middle-aged Isabelle. But then, all the Isabelles are great.

14. Al Gore shouldn’t run for president, because he’s doing such good work speaking out on global warming. I can tell you that Al Gore doesn’t agree with this. At a San Francisco screening of Inconvenient Truth, he specifically said, in response to a question from an audience member, that a president can do a lot more about global warming than any private citizen.

15. Reagan was a terrible president. Ahh, yes, nostalgia for the Carter years — 12 percent inflation rates, 20 percent interest rates, 70 percent tax rates, gas lines, a flummoxed and indecisive foreign policy, diminished standing abroad, malaise at home. Right now, Reagan is ranked in most surveys among the top ten American presidents, and these are surveys, not of Republican ideologues, but of historians. Professors don’t tend to be right-wingers, either.

But even if you don’t agree — and this is my point — if you want to persuade a Republican that the current president’s policies are wrong, don’t trash Ronald Reagan. Avoid the subject. Find common ground. Similarly, in a much more trivial way, I tell Norma Shearer fans, in dealing with skeptics, never to praise Romeo and Juliet(1936), because everybody hates that movie. Even if you love it, keep it to yourself, because the goal always, always, always is to persuade, not to alienate.